A review of A Frieze for a Temple of Love
That morning just before Field read we had a scholarly, urbane talk on Thom Gunn from Peter Carpenter. Thom Gunn is a well-respected poet but his work, deep as it is, certainly lacks the immediacy, the jolt, the punch. It's more ruminative, reflective. Whatever he thought of Gunn, Field as he took the podium threw in as an aside that he could make nothing of the work of Gunn's influence and hero, Robert Lowell.
To hear Edward Field read would be to come in contact with the Beat Generation. It had to be, because he's shown reading from a manuscript in the last photograph but one in the collection of poems and pictures The Beat Scene (Corinth Books, New York, 1960). He also has a couple of poems in The New American Poetry and he kindly signed his section in my copy of that wonderful anthology, as had David Meltzer when I caught up with him in Ipswich a few years earlier.
It must have been around the early '70s when a fair number of my own generation of Britishers started to appreciate the type of poetry printed in those and other books of American verse: laid
back but precise, unbuttoned but formally elegant. The typical reaction of someone raised on Dylan Thomas and Cyril Fletcher at the time, and Walter de la Mare perhaps, and possibly R.S. Thomas, would be to find those great leisurely American lines, like prose lines, lolloping across the paper, as rather overful of air. We hadn't then, many of us, swallowed the Whitmanic afflatus that came over as a yawp. Lawrence had gulped back a bit of it, but Lawrence was usually regarded as a by-blow, not to be admired uncritically, certainly not to be imitated.
Then there I was that day, fortunate enough to be at Edward Field's UK reading début at the Wessex Festival. That Sunday morning, 31st October 1999, he got up and thrilled the audience with his witty, straightforward work read in a soft, engaging voice. At one point he was unable to go on with a poem about his (absent) partner's health problems because he burst into tears. Field shook his head: 'I
always do that, but I thought I'd give it a try.' It was obvious from the poems and his comments that this was a lifelong project, that this man in his seventies had long been living his poetry and making poetry out of his life. (He has, incidentally, made a living reading his work since a tour of duty in WWII as a navigator in bombers over Europe.)
It was amazing to see this American (born on Long Island) enacting still the style and nuances well known in the bars and coffee shops, the Jazz and Poetry concerts of yore. Ginsberg is gone, Burroughs and Kerouac. Ferlinghetti remains though, Michael McClure, Edward Field and one or two others.
It stands, this poetry of Field's, totally divorced from the Academy. It's extremely Beat in that, in its total 'unstuckupness'. This is what you can pile beside the works of your Marianne Moores, your Allen Tates, John Crowe Ransomes and Donald Halls. We don't deny that these poets might have produced thrilling poetry
that we happen not to have seen.
In 'To My Country' Field says, 'Poetry, your literary critics agree,/is supposed to be about language.//So I'm out of luck--/my poems are about people.' Language or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, I think the tribe of Field will last the course longer than faddists and authoritarians will like to acknowledge. There's certainly a chasm between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. Or call them the Apollinians and Dionysiacs, Greeks and Trojans. Allowing, naturally, for a few
crossovers, it's mainly a choice between say birdsong and the fully rehearsed, scored and arranged orchestral bit. It's the former that Field practises. Sometimes his work may seem too unrehearsed, chatty, too off the cuff for some readers. It's as if to Field his verse is his concerns, his day-to-day world, and it could be all one to him whether his commentaries on his life come out as a letter, a note, poetry or what.
It's all highly charged with emotion, anyway, and with the head engaged too. (Which could be a fair thumbnail definition of poetry.) His work, say in 'The Safety' could stand alongside a page of Kafka for its weight of fatalistic, intelligent realism. Realism it is, and not pessimism, when you take into account what Field's personal position was in the queer-hating, Jew-baiting 1940s and '50s. ('... walking in the cold drizzle,/unable to return home,/no friend to go to, no neighbor to trust,/the railroad station a minefield,/the
border a trap./Even sewing a gold coin into my jacket lining/wouldn't help much/when the Safety came to an end.')
From the days when he appeared in The New American Poetry with 'The Floor is Dirty' Field has been preoccupied with bodily functions and the leavings thereof. There are poets who never really make you aware that there is a flush toilet on the premises. Field reminds me of an Ipswich bard who wrote poems to fourteen different parts of his body, including his arsehole. He explained that his lover was fascinated by this organ but didn't like to see it. Field would understand the sentiment perfectly. He continues to this day to convey how absurd it is to feel ashamed about these processes without which we couldn't stay above ground; he also acknowledges that it is, perhaps incomprehensibly, very human of us to feel that shame.
A Frieze for a Temple of Love has at the back a generous wad of prose comments on poetry and
the poetic life as he has seen it. It takes up over a third of the pages of the book. Field's whole motive as a poet, he says, is to aim for clarity because his life has been lived without the stuff, in fear and confusion. There's no obscurity, wilful obscurity anyway, in his work. And obscurity, as he says, being one of the pillars of Modernism, poetry without it was hard to place through most of his lifetime. It's still difficult today. Most poetry editors have thought if it makes too much sense it can't be any good. The intellectualities of Pound, Eliot and Joyce encouraged a lot of hypocritical acceptance of poems legitimised as it were by cranky imagery resembling theirs or dutiful references to aspects of mythology, history, art and politics. It's bad enough trying to like the poets you are told that you ought to like--but when you try to write like them?
There is a new generation of editors, however, or a few of them.
Field's lines move so swiftly, naturally,
like speech, that you can see why people get onto that old carousel of 'Is it really poetry?' It's like asking does Robert Mitchum really act. He was so naturalistic, it was deceiving--but if they put your local bus conductor up there on the screen earning all that money you'd soon see how well he did.
Apart from the fascinating marginalia and gossip about poetry and poets there is 'Silver Wings', Field's notes for a screenplay about American flyboys over here during WWII. He just naturally slips into a free verse form. It's not really filmic, and too short, but a gripping piece of writing, effortless to read. It's all so unnaturally natural. The mind overflows, or the heart and--everything splurges out. But it takes a Field to splurge in quite this naïvely sophisticated manner.
In the work of C.P.Cavafy, one of Field's favourite poets, there's an ever-emerging thread--the thrilling knowledge that the poet is pursuing a forbidden love which is persecuted by
society and connived at by his darlings and those like him. It makes for an excitement, a drama. Field has some of this subterranean fire and relish. Study the biographies and you will be surprised at the amount of time, energy and money devoted by writers and artists to searching out pleasure. Many make a determined, serious quest for it, for some reason. So does Field--hysterically serious, at times. It's like an instinct, the hedonistic instinct, the hedonistic quest, an itchiness in the genes. In 'The Age of AIDS' we hear about KS lesions and the deaths after long determined sex lives of those who are knowingly positive. He discusses his own close but not too close encounter with the postman infected with HIV. When he mentioned practising his Dutch with him I thought it was something erotic, only to realise after reading another poem 'How to Speak Dutch' that the language is a genuine scholarly interest with Field.
All in all Edward Field comes across as a
refreshingly honest poet. He never took on the bearing of a bard, as was generally accepted by the term. It seemed enough to him to be able to practise the art of versemaking in his notebooks. He seems to be a total enthusiast; somehow more like a reader than a writer, in that. An enthusiast who is forever amazed that he's here producing his printed works which people take from the table and leave their cash.
[This review appeared in Tears in the Fence #26, Summer 2000.]